


People Like That

by TheFlashFic



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-10 15:03:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3294788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlashFic/pseuds/TheFlashFic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hartley Rathaway thought of himself as special, but Cisco had met a hundred of him before. (Not especially Hartley-friendly.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	People Like That

**Author's Note:**

> This is not even a real ficlet, really, more a stream of consciousness thing. I just needed to get it out of my system.

 

* * *

 

 

He had Hartley Rathaway pegged from the moment he laid eyes on him. From the drawl of his voice, the smugness in his eyes, the way he sat back – in the presence of Harrison Wells himself – as if he were on a throne and Cisco was a jester sent to amuse him.

Hartley thought of himself as unique, better than everyone. Cisco could have told him that he had met a hundred of him before. Exact copies. Smug, entitled, condescending, brilliant. There was nothing special about Hartley Rathaway.

Cisco had been sixteen, poor, and brown when he was admitted into Stanford and thrown in with the elite. He was put in a dorm room with a sixteen-year-old from Seoul, Ji-Hoon, who was even smaller than him, and they were assigned a den mother in the form of Roger...last name forgotten but it might as well have been Rathaway. Roger was an electrical engineering major who made sure to tell them both, often, how much was expected of them and how fast they’d be shipped back to their homelands if they made the slightest mistake.

In Detroit he had been Armando Ramon’s little brother, not to be messed with. In Detroit it was natural to speak slangy Spanish in everyday conversation, to laugh loudly and talk back at every perceived slight.

In Stanford he was instantly resented by a school full of Hartley Rathaways, guys who considered themselves the best and brightest but had been two or three years older than Cisco when they were accepted in. Speaking Spanish was seen as low-class, and a reminder that Cisco’s admission probably fulfilled some affirmative-action minority requirement or something. And for Cisco to fight back against taco jokes and obnoxious, unaccented  _cumprenday sinyor_  sneers was ‘wrong’.

His second year he took a linear systems and optimization course from a sharp-faced beagle of a Rathaway who spent their few required one-on-ones lecturing about the horrible state of STEM education in Mexico and why no decent scientist he ever knew was from south of the border. Cisco, born in the US to Colombian parents, already knew by then to just sit there and shut up and let him rant.

So yeah, when it came to pretentious geniuses who were so insecure they had to lash out at everyone around them, Cisco had met more than his share already. The science world was full of Rathaways.

Hartley was just another one.

Cisco never understood how guys like him could be so assured about their own superiority, yet so fanatical about proving it every minute of the day. Like his genius (and he  _was_  a genius, Cisco didn't doubt that) didn't count on its own, only in how it reflected off other people. Everything was a contest with Hartley. Every project was 'well, I guess I finished five minutes faster and with ten-thousandths of a percent more accuracy, surprise, surprise. And I know I'm your team lead and have been doing these projects for months while you're brand new but oh, what,  _help_? If you need help you shouldn't even be here.'

Hartley spoke to him in bitten-off Spanish when he wanted to make Cisco remember how different he was, with more fluency but the same unaccented contempt as most of the assholes at Stanford. Hartley made jokes about being gay and how uncomfortable that must have made poor undoubtedly-Catholic Cisquito. (Cisco wasn't religious and his family wasn't either. He had always dated people he thought were awesome no matter what was going on under their clothes. But answering Hartley's mockery with honesty wouldn't have gotten him anywhere. Worse, it probably would have turned Hartley into the personification of one of those Grindr profiles with 'No Beans No Rice' listed on it.)

Cisco Ramon was a friendly, amiable guy by the time he hit his twenties. He had a temper, an old and deep temper that he had learned to restrain in college, but for the most part he was easy-going. He was an unabashed nerd, an optimist about most things, a brilliant mechanical engineer (Wells said so himself), and part of a big, hurting but loving Colombian family.

And he  _hated_ Hartley Rathaway. He hated him with all the force of years of shutting up and taking people's contempt, of struggling to make his way up in a field that didn't seem to like him much, of succeeding, ruling, and still being looked at as a lower life form because Hartley's ego needed that bolster.

Harrison Wells met Cisco on Stanford's campus, shaking his hand without hesitation and enthusing about a paper he wrote about miniaturizing the particle accelerator process with nanofabrication slits on a surface as small as a computer chip. Harrison Wells smiled in mild amusement at Cisco's shorts and Come to the Nerd Side t-shirt, and offered him a job on the spot when Cisco countered his suggestion of timing problems with lasers on those chip-sized mini-accelerators with three instant possible fixes.

Harrison Wells was the living proof that real geniuses didn't need to be competitive. They could be enthusiastic, they could argue and be proven wrong and prove themselves right without having to drag people into the dirt to give themselves a foundation to stand on.

Hartley Rathaway? He was just a dick. It's all he ever would be, and Cisco Ramon had decided the day he left college behind that he was not inviting people like that into his life one second longer than he had to.


End file.
